Twitter's Vine App Ready To Bomb Internet With GIF-Like Videos

Nerval's Lobster writes "Twitter has rolled out Vine, a free app for iOS devices that allows users to shoot and post short videos. Twitter's strategic focus on brevity—the company has long resisted calls to lengthen Tweets beyond the current 140-character limit—extends to Vine videos, which can only be six seconds in length. 'Posts on Vine are about abbreviation — the shortened form of something larger,' Dom Hoffman, Vine's co-founder and general manager, wrote in a blog posting. 'They're little windows into the people, settings, ideas and objects that make up your life.' It's easy to see the Vine acquisition as part of Twitter's larger push into multimedia. The company launched a muscled-up photo service Dec. 10, complete with Instagram-style filters and editing tools. That photo launch came on the heels of an escalating battle with Instagram, the Facebook subsidiary, which decided to disable photo integration with Twitter; that same month, Yahoo also decided to jump into the fray with a new Flickr app for iPhone, complete with special filters and the ability to post images to various social networks."

You mean, like 5 second films?

[DavidClarkeHR]

Wow. This is so innovative. I can't believe someone didn't invent it and bring it to the internet before 2008 [5secondfilms.com] ...

Re:6 seconds?

[chronokitsune3233]

Indeed. ^H is a shortened form of Ctrl-H (C-H for those Emacs lovers). Since H is the eighth letter of the Latin alphabet, it corresponds to ASCII character code 0x08: the backspace (BS) control code. A horizontal tab was code 0x09, so when you press the tab key or use the "\t" escape in strings in a programming language, you're actually sending that control code. Of course, that's mostly ancient history now for most. Keyboard manufacturers, Assembly programmers and hardware driver creators come to mind as the few who might actually need to know such information...

Unicode++;

Re:6 seconds?

[SuricouRaven]

Short version: In certain circumstances, rarely encountered on modern operating systems but once frustratingly common, pressing backspace would not be recognised and instead give you a ^H symbol. Worse, under very specific circumstances the backspace might be recognised by the OS (erasing a character on screen) but passed as ^H to the application - from the user's perspective, all works, but really their typoes and erased sentences are getting recorded as part of whatever document they are writing.

I have encountered it myself only once, when connected via serial terminal with the wrong termtype set. Back when serial terminals were common this was a very easy mistake to make, but serial terminals today are confined only to hardware configuration ports and occasionally access-of-last-resort on servers.